BREAKING NEWS: Plata/Coleman Panel Displeased with State Plan

The Sac Bee reports:

Three federal judges on Wednesday rejected the prison reduction reduction plan submitted to them by the state and gave the Schwarzenegger administration three more weeks to produce a plan that complies with their wishes.

If the court doesn’t get one by Nov. 12, the judges said they will order attorneys who represent sick inmates to submit a plan by the end of November, and the judges would order that plan be implemented.

More coverage from KPCC, including an interesting interview with Don Spector, is here.

The inmates have filed for contempt. The court’s show of displeasure is less drastic (we predicted slim chances for an actual contempt ruling), but nevertheless, it puts the state in an uncomfortable position. I tend to agree with Jonathan Simon that justifying the new plan as one that keeps public safety in mind is preposterous given the order’s language. I also find the court’s position strengthened by the lack of stay from the Supreme Court (whatever that might mean on the merits). Stay tuned.

Guard-to-Inmate-Ratios: The View from CCPOA

In the new issue of Peacekeeper, Mike Jimenez, President of CCPOA, discusses prison guard pay cuts and furloughs on the CCPOA website.

As individuals we have a role in the effects of our zeal for our work place. We also have a role in the determination of our own morale. In accepting these responsibilities, we need and respect leaders who have the courage to tell us when things are tough, that we will have to sacrifice and that these difficulties may last for awhile. Leadership requires in these instances that the boss be consistent in the application of cost-cutting measures. It requires that there be a sense of purpose toward a common goal and that the goal be attainable.

We have yet to see these qualities in this administration-so, as the old CDCR saying goes: Expect the beatings to continue until morale improves.

The CCPOA is very critical of the furlough policy, and cites to this Senate report, suggesting that furloughs will not yield real savings for the state. As the report argues, in “round-the-clock” institutions, workers aren’t really taking furloughs, and when they are, labor costs are simply pushed to future years. Other articles on the website raise concern regarding violent incidents due to understaffing.

However, the piece I found most interesting was this critique of overcrowding by Kevin Raymond. A correctional sergeant, Raymond discusses overcrowding from the guards’ perspective, arguing that safety considerations have made the situation untenable. He discusses the National Institute of Corrections’ “direct supervision” principles, which stand in contrast to the classic “warehouse ’em” rationale, but actually do not contradict prison safety. Rather, they promote it.

The principles dictate that staff must know the inmate population and what is transpiring on their turf. You’ll note that under these principles the prison belongs to the staff not the inmates–a novel idea.

However, before the principles of direct supervision can effectively be put into play, a few very important things must transpire. Management, supervisors, and line staff all must be willing to admit that what we are doing now is a huge failure. California’s recidivism rate makes this abundantly clear. And all must be willing to embrace the change in the mindset. More important, there has to be a reduction in the inmate population without a commensurate reduction in staffing levels.

Raymond moves on to discuss the modeling of juvenile institutions after the successful Missouri model, and the failure to achieve similar results because of overcrowding. He is even more pessimistic about the adult institutions: “The adult side of the house has been reducing actual inmate programs for years, settling on a few time-honored favorites, such as substance abuse training.”

The bottom line is quite simple–prison overcrowding is a killer to any real inmate rehabilitation. As well, the current conditions in CDCR’s institutions provide for inmates to do nothing more than scheme and plot their illegal activities and disruptions. It is time for both a change in conditions and a change in attitudes. And the principles of direct supervision are critical tools in a corrections toolbox that, unfortunately, currently sits unopened.

The question is, therefore, whether CCPOA will relegate its efforts to the fight against pay cuts and furloughs, or whether it will expand horizons to fight the other side of the guard-to-inmate ratio.

Compare and Contrast: Empty Beds in NYC


Robert Gangi’s New York Times Op-Ed yesterday provides an interesting contrast to California’s overcrowding. In New York, prison population has declined from 71,600 in 1999 to about 59,300 today, accompanied by a decline in crime rates. Gangi, who is Executive Director of the Correctional Association of New York, believes that further improvements are necessary:

For starters, state lawmakers could repeal the Rockefeller mandatory sentencing provisions that remain on the books. They could also increase the number of participants on work release. In 1994, more than 27,000 people were in this time-tested program that helps them manage the transition back to their communities. Today, about 2,500 are enrolled.

In addition, the state could reduce the number of people — last year, more than 9,000 — who are returned to prison for technical parole violations like missing a meeting with an officer or breaking curfew. Most experts agree that for about half of these people it would be safer and smarter to enroll them in re-entry programs or provide more supervision. Also, more prisoners with good institutional records could be given parole. And eligibility for so-called merit time, which reduces prison terms for inmates who complete educational and other programs, could be expanded to people convicted of violent offenses many years ago.

Taken together, these actions could cut the state’s prison rolls by 5,000 to 10,000 more, enabling the governor and the legislature to close at least four prisons the size of Attica, which holds 2,100 inmates, or a greater number of smaller facilities.

The Rockefeller Drug Laws, which the Correctional Association protests, were enacted in 1973 and included harsh minimum sentences for drug offenses, including non-violent possession. After decades of this problematic regime, a current 2009 reform is rolling back some of its effects, including cancellation of minimum sentencing, an expansion of therapeutic options, and, interestingly, allowing retroactive resentencing of drug offenders. This unusual step stems from the 2005 conversion of certain drug offenses from class “B” offenses, which in NY require indeterminate sentences, to lower class offenses. Offenders sentenced before this change will be able to petition the judge and be resentenced, a possibility that will affect 1,500 current inmates.

These are bold steps, and one can only guess what we would be able to accomplish were our processes and priorities similar to the ones of the New York legislature.

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Props to Jessie Daniels for drawing my attention to this.

Why Overcrowding?

The CDCR Annual Report, which we began discussing here, provides some important information on the composition of the CA prison population, which might help decipher some of the mystery behind overcrowding.

In an interesting piece published last year, John Pfaff argues that prison population growth is not so much a factor of lengthy sentences (through such legislation as Three Strikes) but more of an increase of inmates serving short sentences. He also cautions against assuming that most of the population increase is a product of parole violations. His study, however, did not include California. The numbers provided by CDCR do not provide a conclusive explanation of what is going on, but they do allow some thought about the source of overcrowding.

Here, for example, is a snapshot of the breakdown of new admissions to CA prisons.

As we can see, a large percentage of new admissions, albeit not the majority of them, is due to parole violations. When focusing only on people admitted to prison for new offenses, the following picture emerges:

Serious, violent offenses, constitute a non-negligible, but by no means dominant, percentage of all admissions. When considering admissions for new offenses, violent offenders are about 33% of all incarcerations. However, when considering that new offenses provide only 25% of all inmates, it would appear that offenders incarcerated for violent offenses are only about 8% of all inmates.
What about the Three Strikes Law? The numbers of second- and third-strikers seem to be rather low.

Note that, while these lengthier incarcerations account for only a very small percentage of all inmates, their advanced age and medical expenses might account for a large part of the CDCR budget.

Stay tuned for an analysis of the parole data.

Another Out-Of-State Jail Plan Collapses

For the last few years, the state of California has relied on out-of-state prisons to relieve overcrowding. According to a Prison Law Office report, as of December 2008, over 5,800 male California prisoners were housed in out-of-state facilities. The CDCR’s goal is to house a total of 8,000 prisoners in other states. There are currently five active out-of-state facilities, which are located in Arizona, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

Remember the failure of the attempt to reach an agreement about housing inmates in Michigan? Another attempt, to take over an empty Montana Jail with a 464-bed capacity, is not looking promising. A lawyer has quit and a company once listed as a subcontractor now denies involvement in the project. What is going on? AP writer Matthew Brown reports on the Chron:

Those moves followed revelations earlier in the week that Michael Hilton — the lead figure of the company, American Police Force — is a convicted felon with a history of fraud and failed business dealings in California.

“We met with him and he asked us if we can support him,” said Edward Angelino, chief executive of Allied Defense Systems, an Irvine, Calif.-based defense contractor. “We checked his background, we checked his company. He’s not an adequate person to do business with.”

Much has been written about the merits and pitfalls of prison privatization. Many scholars raise serious concerns about the impact of privatization on the treatment of prisoners. As Oliver Hart, et al, argue in this piece on the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the risks of privatization include the contractor’s strong incentive to reduce costs, ignoring the adverse effect on non-contractable quality. Judith Greene cites several examples of violence and cruelty, not to mention standards falling beneath constitutional minimums, in privatized prisons. The Heritage Foundation holds a more positive view of prison privatization. As Travis Pratt shows in this piece in The Prison Journal, it is fairly difficult to reach conclusive findings based on the studies conducted so far to compare confinement standards in public and private prisons. It seems that the Montana deal has the added complication of being an out-of-state facility. I suggest watching this very closely over the next few weeks; as the overcrowding relief plan approved by the legislature has not even come close to what is necessary to alleviate the financial problem, and as litigation of the Plata/Coleman decision proceeds, more information of this sort may come to public attention.

Is Incarcerating Minors an Even More Wasteful Crisis?

WireTap Magazine has a great interview with Liz Ryan of the Campaign for Youth Justice. CYFJ argues that incarcerating minors does not work (does not reduce recidivism, does not deter crime), is very unsafe, and is unfair.

According to the California Attorney General’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center, in 2005 the state of California incarcerated juveniles at a rate of 23.8 per 100,000 at-risk population, compared to 131.9 for adults. In particular, in 2005 California arrested juveniles for drugs at a rate of 486.9 per 100,000 at-risk population, versus 1173.5 adults.

Minors are arguably the most vulnerable members of our prison population. In a recent post, California Corrections Crisis points out that Zimbabwe has just decided to release all minors from all prisons to reduce overcrowding. Since California is having trouble finding 40,000 inmates to release, perhaps we should consider releasing all inmates under 18 years age.

Contempt or Cooperation?

Given the State’s population reduction plan, which falls short of the Plata/Coleman order, the question becomes: What can the court do, and what should it do?

I find the latter question much more interesting than the former. We know that courts have the authority to send one to prison for contempt, sometimes not as reasonably as one would hope. But I don’t see how that would be helpful in any way in this situation. But what about monetary penalties? Or asking for adjustments to the order?
There are various complicating factors here. On one hand, as Judge Karlton explained in his luncheon address at our conference last March, this is the last in a long series of problematic interactions between the state and federal courts regarding corrections and constitutional rights. Faithful followers of the crisis will recall how close the court was to hold Governor Schwarzenegger in contempt for not providing the receiver with funds to improve health care.
On the other hand, even the Plata/Coleman decision acknowledged that, while the state was late to respond to court requirements in the Coleman case, state officials eventually did cooperate with the special masters. Given the dramatic implications of federal intervention in prison population management, the court would prefer cooperation and, possibly, an incremental improvement of the proposed plan, to an adversarial step that will alienate the state even further.

CA Plan Falls Short of Reduction Order

The expected plan is much closer to the original Governor’s plan. The AP reports (with interviews with Michael Bien and yours truly):

Instead of 40,000 inmates, the state’s plan is expected reduce the population by about 25,000 over two years, according to those who were briefed on the plan. Details were to be released late Friday afternoon.

The state already has taken steps to get part way to the goal.

Earlier this month, the Legislature voted to use a variety of methods to reduce the prison population by 16,000 inmates as a way to save nearly $1 billion in this fiscal year’s state budget. Corrections officials also are expected to recommend transferring additional inmates to prisons in other states and adding more beds under a prison-construction program previously approved by the Legislature.

The State Will Not Comply with Plata/Coleman Requirement!

Tomorrow is the deadline imposed by the Plata/Coleman panel for the State to come up with a population reduction plan. As the Chron reports today, the State will NOT comply with the deadline.

[T]he plan California officials will submit by midnight Friday will fall short of meeting the 40,000-inmate reduction ordered last month by the federal panel, state prison officials said in a briefing Wednesday to various parties, including legislative staffers who work on prison issues.

. . .

The state officials did not tell by how much their plan would fall short but said they may revise it before they submit it Friday, sources said. The officials also said they expect the judges to find the state in contempt for failing to meet the demand, one source said.

If the judges decide the state deliberately violated their order, they could hold the defendants – Schwarzenegger, Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate and state Controller John Chiang – in contempt. The court would have the power to send any or all of them to jail until they complied with the order, but that’s unlikely in light of events earlier in the case.

What complicates matters, of course, is the “rival plan” approved by the Assembly, which we discussed elsewhere, and which falls short of generating any serious systematic change through sentencing reform. Given the disappointing scope of this plan, the State’s argument against Federal judicial involvement in prison management becomes significantly weaker. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s developments.

Chino “Archaeology” as Example of Overcrowding

This morning’s editorial in the Contra Costa Times offers a critique of the legislature’s watered-down decrowding plan.

Critics claimed that the original plan would have sparked crime sprees across the state. Done properly that would not have been likely, but the scare tactic carried the day.

That simply guarantees next year’s session will be much more difficult because more severe changes must come.

A three-member federal judge panel ordered the state to reduce its inmate population by 40,000 in two years and the state has until Friday to come up with the plan. The state appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and asked for a delay of that order, but, as expected, it lost.

The state is in this corner because it has put itself there. It is the consequence of inaction — years of inaction.

This attention to the crisis in Contra Costa County is quite notable. As some readers may remember, the downscaling in charges, stemming from budgetary cuts to the DA’s office in Contra Costa, has drawn critique from the police and the community. Nevertheless, the local newspaper does a good job aiming at raising awareness to the crisis. A few days ago, the newspaper reported on prison overcrowding, focusing on Chino, in the aftermath of the riots, as an example.

A gymnasium is a sea of bunk beds. The 213 inmates inside are quarantined on this day, the result of worries about a swine flu outbreak. In a room such as this, there is nowhere for a virus to go but directly to another inmate never more than a foot or two away. The basketball hoops and theater stage are reminders that this decaying part of the prison was never meant to house prisoners.

. . .

The situation ensures the spotlight will remain on prisons such as Chino’s, which has operated at or near 200 percent of its intended capacity, brimming with nearly 6,000 inmates in a facility designed 70 years ago for half that.

Even the stretches of this prison actually designed to house inmates appear bleakly overtaxed. Inside Madrone Hall, two inmates jam into 6-by-11-foot cells meant for a single bed. A second bed chained to the wall during the day is dropped to the floor at night, flat and tin-looking to earn the name “cookie sheet bed.”

The overcrowding also is causing predictable chaos. Indeed, just four days after the federal court order, it was the Chino prison that erupted in violence. And while the Aug. 8 riot was linked to race-related tensions, it underscored how incendiary it can be to run a prison so overstuffed with inmates.